


boundless

by peraltiagoesoff



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Oneshot, Peraltiago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 16:03:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17963693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peraltiagoesoff/pseuds/peraltiagoesoff
Summary: "Because that’s not him, not really, it’s just a façade. It’s just all that he knows."





	boundless

**Author's Note:**

> without sounding pretentious, i wrote this because i wanted to explore the more emotional side of Jake, because nobody is really that carefree and happy inside their own mind. and I think he's just really uncomfortable with the vulnerability of expressing emotions, especially since, as a child, he lacked close parental relationships. hope u enjoy :)

Checking his watch again, Jake was growing increasingly convinced that time was slowing down. He hadn't even been aware that he was capable of being this nervous, hands clasped to his stomach as he paced. Because this wasn't him, this wasn't Jake, people didn't make him nervous. And yet there was Amy, his co-worker of eight years, able to send him into an anxiety spiral unlike anything he'd ever felt before.

There are no words to describe the way Jake felt about Amy, and perhaps that's a good thing. He's scared that if he's able to literate his feelings, that it would make them real. He wonders if this is really how it should be – how love should feel. He wonders whether he wants to feel love at all, he despises how fragile it makes him.

He gets into his car, half an hour before he needs to, and just sits there. He doesn't want to turn up at Amy's too soon, he doesn't want her to know how much he cares. He watches the sky from its cracked window, the inky blackness enveloping the shades of asphalt. He's so used to living life at double-speed, it juxtaposes so hideously with the slowed pace of waiting. He gives up, driving to Amy's. She's ready, she's waiting too. And he realises that maybe this isn't a one-sided love after all.

She's in the dress, the hideously blue one that he had spent hours browsing for to show her that he didn't care, that this was all a joke. Yet somehow, she still manages to look stunning, features dipped in the moonlight. Stunning not like a faded girl in a magazine, but stunning in reality, stunning in the way her face lights up when she sees him, and she shines through the ashen city, blinding him. Jake wonders whether she's real, she resembled perfection to the point where it was impossible for her to be anything more than a hallucination.

"Hey. You're early." Her voice is softer than a whale song and he feels himself falling just a little bit more. He averts his eyes, looking down, looking straight ahead, looking anywhere but at her.

"Busy night ahead. Lots of embarrassing to do." His words are calm, but he's floundering, so suddenly aware of how close they are, in his tiny dusty car.

He drives, through the pulsating neon of the traffic lights, and the congested New York roads. Jake has a CD on, Funky Gold Medina, the only song that doesn't skip, playing on repeat. Amy pretends to mind. Rain clouds the wind screen. He regrets his choice in location, Brooklyn Bridge Park; the smooth dark river glinting in the twilight and reflecting the city lights made the location almost romantic.

Jake drags her by the hand to a van parked by the river, and she gasps at the contents. She's confronted with a tiger cub, behind bars. Jake almost feels bad, to see the tiger cub locked inside the cage. He too is familiar with the feeling of being trapped, trapped in the body of a hyperactive young boy with an inability for sensibility. Because that's not him, not really, it's just a façade. It's just all that he knows.

Amy's laughing though, and he's falling again. "He's kind of cute, once you're used to him." She pulls out her phone to take a picture with the cub. Jake tries to roll his eyes, but sinks back into an easy smile.

"How did you even get a tiger cub?" She asks, perhaps surprised by his uncharacteristic passivity.

"Charles knows this really shady guy. He rents all sorts of things: tiger cubs, seatbelts, soap- "

"Okay stop." She interjects, but she's smiling and that's enough. "Soap? Why would you even rent that, like ever? It costs like five dollars for a bar of soap. Just buy one!"

"Capitalism, Amy."

And suddenly, with the honesty of their smiles, Jake doesn't feel like he can trust himself anymore, and so he brings her attention back to the tiger cub, back to where he's safe. "Anyway,  I think Tony left some meat in the front of the van." He opened the front car door, putrid fumes hitting him with the intensity of a slap. He coughed violently, bringing out a bag of meat to Amy. The smell travels towards her and she grimaces.

"My rules. You've got to feed it."

She picks up a slab of meat, the blood running down her wrist and onto the grass. She throws it in, and the tiger runs to it, devouring it. She pulls a face, the red juices still covering her.

"I've got something for that." Jake pulls out a bottle of orange soda, covering her arm in it, before wiping it off with a piece of toilet roll in his bag. She glares at him. He grows hyperaware of her hand in his, feeling her pulse, her warm palms, her small fingers. Her fingertips feel as dangerous as knives on him, but he doesn't want them gone. And he feels himself losing control. His chest tightens, unsure of how to put his head back in place, how to make sense of everything he was feeling hitting him at once.

He pulls his hands away from her, the warmth seeping from his body until he is numb again. 

"We've got to get going." He says, distant.

They walk back to his car in silence, and he drives them to Times Square. Walking down the cobbled streets, he hands her a small bottle of vodka, which she chugs hurriedly, in a desperate attempt to warm up. She coughs, rummaging around her bag for some water.

"What the hell was that?"

He laughs, as if it were easy, as if that's all that happens inside his head, handing her a bottle of water. "Chilli vodka." He takes a shot of his own, followed quickly by a large drink of water. "That is vile."

A children's choir began singing Amy's name, she glares at Jake as they spewed childish insults. She's freezing, she always is, and so he gives her his coat. She laughs into him, as she listens and they drink. And she watches the choir, seemingly absentmindedly, feigning indifference. But in truth she's neither absentminded nor indifferent, because she's more than slightly infatuated with his smile, as he stares at her, hoping for a reaction.

They sat there for a while, breathing slower and deeper, her hands on his. Because engulfed in the ink of the night, they could pretend it meant nothing.

The moon watches them stumble through Brooklyn, half-intoxicated on alcohol, half-intoxicated with the notion of existence itself. It bathes them in silver glory, and for a moment, they're invincible. They feel eternal and untouchable, infinite for life, and for Brooklyn, and for each other. They're serenaded by the streetlights, fabricating meanings from the brightness of it all. And their intoxication made everything just a little bit more beautiful, the world presenting itself in technicolour.

He walks her to her front door because he can, because it's too late and they're too drunk. And when the door closes, the euphoria of the alcohol fades and they're both empty.

\---

The next day at work they're pretending to be strangers. Every effort cast into the perpetuation of an endless charade. Unlike underneath the inky night skies, under the broken work lights, there was nowhere to hide.

They kept their distance, yet the air was thick with stolen glances and words unspoken. The nights were longer now, and the sparks only grew.

Jake finds her outside, the stress of one of her cases had overcome her. Ease wraps around her lungs as her fingers fumble with a cigarette, watching the rings of grey rhythmically rising in rapid bursts.

"Can we talk?" He asks, with trembling hands leading her inside. They go to the evidence room, where it's dark and small and they don't feel safe.

She nods, predicting the conversation topic. "What's this about?"

"I just – Please. Don't pretend like you don't feel it." His voice is desperate, yearning, he can't pretend anymore.

Warmth rises with the heat of a fire inside Amy's chest, yet her fear of mistaking the meaning behind his words controlled her, and so she feigns confusion. "Feel what?"

And then his lips are on hers, slow and gentle, and Jake was burning with more than just temperature. He's enveloped in a strange amalgamation of nicotine and perfume, he can taste the sunrise and the moonlight and a thousand stars. He feels her pulse, a metronome, running up her body and down his, connecting them, grounding him.

Warm lips, shaky breaths. She paints her fingertips against his cheeks, he tousles her hair.

Their bodies morph into one another, pieces in a puzzle.

They kiss until their lips are numb and exhausted.

And then with uneven breaths, Jake asks. "Do you want this to be a thing? Because I really like you. So much."

And Amy just can't stop smiling, and she just nods, and leans back in to kiss him.

And they need to tell Captain Holt and Jake's scared, so scared, because now that their relationship is tangible, it can be so easily lost. This vulnerability that he fears so much is what makes it so hard for him to give pieces of himself away. He's scared they'll only come back to him, shattered.

But Amy's hand is there, right where Jake wants to reach for it. Their roles have been reversed, he is now more stressed than he's ever been, while she has become the simulacrum of placidity, gentler than waves caressing the shoreline at noon, with an almost unintelligent amount of faith in their relationship.

And it's not like Jake doesn't have faith in their relationship, it's just that he doesn't have faith anything, not really. Because, despite his never-ending quips about the lack of guidance throughout his childhood, its instability left a lasting scar on the person he is today. And he's scared, that everything's a lie, that nothing will last, that soon she'll be gone.

But Captain Holt merely reminds them of the departmental guidelines for relationships within the precinct, and drafts a letter to HR.

After work, they go back to Amy's. They lay on her bed for hours, heads haloed by messy hair, his thumb resting below her ear, gently tracing the outline of her cheek. Their breaths mingled, elation percolating into Jake's veins because this was everything he would ever need.

Jake trusts the nights. They held the consistent kind of beauty that reigned, unchanging, and without dispute, and in this stochastic world of inconsistencies, they anchored him.

He smiled at her through the heaviness of his eyelids, and she smiled at him back through dark fluttering lashes.

He's more in love with the world than he's ever been.

\---

"It's like... I know she's gone. But I don't want to know that."

Jake was swivelling his chair, legs quivering, trying to force out words that his throat seemed innately opposed to letting out. Because once he said them, truths in their purest form, they were real. He wanted nothing more than to stop talking, to curl into a ball and let the world fade. But he knew the only way for his head to stop spinning was to make better sense of the mess of indistinguishable feelings inside his mind.

He transferred out of the ninety-ninth precinct, he couldn't go into the bullpen without imagining her there with him, as if she'd never left. And he'd talk to her, and Charles would gently remind him that she was gone but he knew. He always knew. He just longed to believe that, to cling to that fantasy. She's a shadow of a person and so is he. And there were too many memories surrounding that dusty old building.

His work in his new precinct labelled him a hero. He worked to live and to die, reckless to the point of stupidity. He didn't have a death wish – not really. He just didn't care about living anymore. There was an incessant ache tearing apart his insides until he was all shadows and specs of dust and, maybe something about the adrenaline rush of almost dying sparked aches to rival the constant dull one, because centimetres away from death were the only times his thoughts abated and he felt alive again.

"Would you say it's like you want to convince yourself she's still there but you can't?" His therapist asked. Her voice was calming, slow.

"Yeah. Yeah that's it."

Amy Santiago died six months ago. There'd been an active shooter near the shopping mall that she was in. Jake drove down as soon as he heard but it was too late. She'd had a bullet to her head.

He remembered watching her body being carried out the mall, his eyes narrowing and widening again like shadows cast under the travelling sun. Her skin looked almost translucent, it was pale and faded, almost as if this was her ghost. His eyes blurred like stars burning out and he screamed, a piercing scream, drilling holes into the skulls of everyone around him.

Jake sees himself in only pieces, he's just skin and bone and the cigarette smoke trapped in the fabric of Amy's clothes. His loneliness is an addictive affliction, not unlike Amy's smoking. He's pushed everyone away, he barely talks to the nine-nine anymore. They wanted to be there for him, for him to talk to, but his pain was unimaginable and impossible to literate to anyone but Amy. 

Everything's harder without her steady hands. His brain has grown loose on its tether, striving to detach from his body and drift off into the night sky.

He is kneeling at her grave, just talking. He's apologising for not being there, for not being better, for waiting so long to ask her out, for all their lost time. It's three in the morning. It always is. 

The air tastes bitter and the cold chill bites at his toes. All light is obscured bar the eclipse of blazing stars, strung out above him, dispersing like embers of a dying fire and illuminating the matte canopy above.

He moves to lie down, next to her grave. Hair on the grass, eyes on the sky. Completely covered by rain-washed darkness, Jake's heart hammers in time with the falling droplets. He inhales, the ambrosial scents taking him back to _before_ , to Brooklyn Bridge with Amy, and walks in the City Parks. He exhales, his breath dissipating, the heaviness of his fragile body disappearing with it. He watches the sunrise with her, watch it bathe the charcoal skies in tangerine and dare to call itself more than just a blood bath.

Their love is a dead thing, but it's one that he'll hold onto until the end of the universe itself. Their first date, first kiss, these were all scorched by burning candles into the back of his retinas forever. Maybe that was the problem. He loved her with more than the world could contain. 


End file.
